Emmanuel Music in the News

2014-2015 Season

Emmanuel Music, with Andrew Rangell, Piano, at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival
Charles Warren | New York Arts | July 3, 2015

It is always a pleasure to be in the Cape Ann harbor town of Rockport and to attend musical events in the beautiful Shalin Liu recital hall with its glass wall looking out to sea. The June 26th concert provided a striking contrast in styles of Baroque era music, with works of Bach and Handel, respectively, in the two parts of the program. The listener was invited into an emotional journey from darkness to light. more...

ROCKPORT — In addition to importing high-caliber groups and performers, Rockport Music has smartly forged relationships with a number of important Boston ensembles. Case in point: Emmanuel Music, which the Rockport Chamber Music Festival brought to the Shalin Liu Performance Center on Friday for a program of works by Bach and Handel. more...

Under its excellent Artistic Director Ryan Turner, Emmanuel Music performed a Mozart Singspiel in concert on Saturday night at the namesake church with an extraordinary cast. Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio)became an instant success when it premiered in 1782, though nowadays The Abduction nowadaysis the least frequently performed of Mozart’s most famous four. It has been accused of being “too beautiful for our ears” and of having “too many notes” (by the Emperor himself, probably apocryphally) and an excessive diversity of styles. more...

"Fireworks and fine singing were plentiful Saturday night in Emmanuel Music’s performance of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio.

Mozart’s first big operatic success, Abduction is technically a singspiel, with spoken dialogue alternating with sets and arias. Emmanuel Music chose to present the dialogue in English, which jarred at first, but made sense; Abduction was intended to be a popular opera, not opaque, and it would have been difficult to fit titles in Emmanuel Church. Thanks to the singer’s clear and forward enunciation of dialogue, the plot unfolded as easily as if it had been staged." more...

Emmanuel Music treats every Mozart note of ‘Abduction’ just right
Jeffrey Gantz |Boston Globe | May 11, 2015

"Too beautiful for our ears, and a great many notes, dear Mozart,” is reported to have been Emperor Joseph II’s complaint upon hearing “The Abduction From the Seraglio.” Had the emperor been present at Emmanuel Music’s concert performance Saturday at Emmanuel Church, he might have reached a more positive conclusion." more...

Talk with WCRB's Brian McCreath about the emotional power, interpretive challenges, and his own vision of J.S. Bach's St. John Passion, a work broadcast on 99.5 WCRB on Sunday, Mar. 29, at 7pm, in a concert performance by Emmanuel Music. Read more and Listen to the interview here

“You don’t know Bach unless you know the ‘St. John Passion.’” That was Emmanuel Music founder Craig Smith writing on the occasion of Emmanuel’s recording of the work in 1999. “It is misshapen, personal, and messy,” he continued, “in the same way that the story is misshapen, personal, and messy.” Saturday at Emmanuel Church, current Emmanuel Music artistic director Ryan Turner led the orchestra and choir in a “St. John Passion” that mostly did justice to Smith’s sentiments. more...

Emmanuel Music offers a lithe, intimate take on Bach’s “St. John Passion”Aaron Keebaugh |Boston Classical Review | March 22, 2015

Emmanuel Music’s performance of the St. John Passion was powerful in its depiction of the Christian story, with all forces of the choir and orchestra working together as a living, breathing organism. more...

If the opening chorus of Bach’s St. John Passion took to legato, eschewing punch, there certainly was power throughout “Lord, our ruler, Whose fame in every land is glorious!” More orchestra to enrich this stirring prediction of what was to come seemed in order. With Saturday evening’s performance by Emmanuel Music under the direction of Ryan Turner came a good dose of artistry. more...

Emmanuel Music continued its examination of the chamber music of Felix Mendelssohn and all 53 songs from Gedichte von Eduard Mörike fur eine Singstimme und Klavier by Hugo Wolf on Sunday in the Parish Hall. The objective seems to be revealing unsuspected connections between the two composers when their works are interspersed; I confess I didn’t perceive any connections, separated as these compositions are by 60+ years and the Himalayan divide of Richard Wagner. But it was nevertheless satisfying to hear a mixture of the well-known and lesser-known in mostly accomplished performances. And among the songs, at least, there were cross-references, even at times suggestions of storylines. more...

Sunday afternoon Emmanuel Music kicked off Year I of its Mendelssohn/Wolf Chamber Series in the Parish Hall. The series continues with two more concerts this season and encompass all 53 of Wolf’s Mörike Lieder. From what I heard, this series will draw crowds.
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Best known for its cycles of Bach cantatas, Emmanuel Music gave a concert featuring music for string orchestra and voice Friday night at the Longy School. The sensitive programming of Artistic Director Ryan Turner allowed the wide-ranging repertoire, from Mendelssohn to Stravinsky to a new work by John Harbison, not only to achieve a cogent unity but also to reveal some fascinating interconnections. more..

Emmanuel Music starts its season at a ‘Crossroads
Jeffrey Gantz | Boston Globe | October 18, 2014

The “crossroads” of the Emmanuel Music evening at Longy School of Music on Friday was John Harbison’s 2012 title piece, a setting of three poems from Louise Glück’s 2009 volume “A Village Life.” “Crossroads” acted as a meeting place for Felix Mendelssohn’s Sinfonia No. 2 (written in 1821, when the composer was just 12), Hugo Wolf’s “Italian Serenade” (1887), and selections from Wolf’s “Mörike-Lieder” (1888), and Igor Stravinsky’s Concerto in D for strings (1946). more..

2013-2014 Season

Pianissimo: Memorable keyboard art by Russell Sherman and Marc-André Hamelin and chamber music by the Takács and Borromeo String Quartets trigger some personal reminiscencesLloyd Schwartz | New York Arts| May 21, 2014

One performer who didn’t know he had a major influence on my career as a critic is the Boston pianist and legend Russell Sherman, who concluded Emmanuel Music’s four-year Beethoven chamber series on March 30 with an extraordinary chamber concert that also celebrated Sherman’s 84th birthday. more . .

John Harbison's The Supper at Emmaus -
co-commissioned by Emmanuel Music and Cantata Singers - received great reviews.
Matthew Guerrieri | Boston Globe | May 10, 2014

The warm applause for the composer onstage Friday night reflected not just the quality of the new work but the audience’s awareness of the decades-long creative relationship among Harbison, Hoose and the Cantata Singers, and Emmanuel Music under its late director Craig Smith. more . .

Emmanuel Music’s performance of Handel’s oratorio Susanna on Saturday at Emmanuel Church brought the story vividly to life with a stellar cast of singers and instrumentalists led by music director Ryan Turner. Susanna tells the story of the chaste young wife who is framed by two elders (corrupt judges, in fact) who, “inflamed by lust,” set upon her as she bathes in her garden during her husband’s absence. When she rejects their advances, they accuse her of adultery with a younger man. more . .

Emmanuel Music provided a strong performance of Handel’s Susanna, in its belated Boston premiere Saturday night. The work is not one of Handel’s more frequently performed oratorios, and this concert performance exposed the work’s shortcomings while also making a convincing case for its revival. This latter was due mainly to a fine cast of singers and the polished contributions of the Emmanuel chorus and orchestra. more . .

Emmanuel Music, one of Boston’s most celebrated musical gems, had plenty to celebrate this past Sunday. It was the final concert of a very successful four-year survey of Beethoven’s chamber music, and was the 84th birthday (actually five days before) of the beloved pianist Russell Sherman. In addition to turning out a generations of amazing piano students, Sherman has been an integral part of the evolution of Emmanuel Music, both in terms of his spirit and his performances. more . .

Not everyone can upstage the most formidably famous composer in the Western canon, but not everyone is Russell Sherman. On Sunday, for the final concert of Emmanuel Music’s four-year-long survey of Beethoven’s chamber music, the pianist made his first appearance since breaking his hip last September, and his return became the concert’s cynosure. more . .

Given the history of Mozart and Strauss operas at Emmanuel Music under its late founding director Craig Smith, it’s not so far-fetched that Emmanuel’s current director Ryan Turner would turn to A Little Night Music for its first attempt at a Broadway musical. It was imaginatively staged by mezzo soprano (and now cantor) Lynn Torgove on a series of platforms (with no conventional scenery and the orchestra on stage) at the Boston Conservatory Theatre. more . .

“Why an Emmanuel Music A Little Night Music?” asks artistic director Ryan Turner in the program to this weekend’s performances of the Stephen Sondheim musical. But really this is only a surface level surprise—a matter of category that Emmanuel would present musical theater in addition to its usual Bach cantatas—it all makes perfect sense once you see the show. The need for justification has been greatly exaggerated. more . .

What do Stephen Sondheim and Johann Sebastian Bach have in common? That’s not a trick question. Emmanuel Music, the beloved ensemble that made its reputation with a commitment to perform Bach’s sacred cantatas “in the liturgical setting for which they were intended” stretched out this past weekend in a much-anticipated (and sold-out) semi-staged production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical A Little Night Music. more . .

Let me admit right off that I have always been prejudiced against Stephen Sondheim. Here is a man who writes for the benighted Broadway stage who has so little skill at composition – or so little interest in how his work ends up – that he sends his skeletal scores out to an arranger to flesh out into their final form. more . .

In its 43 years, Emmanuel Music has become a preeminent Boston institution, presenting weekly Bach cantatas in liturgical setting and performing concert repertoire from Baroque to contemporary. Programming one of the great 20th-century operettas may therefore take some by surprise, but Turner doesn’t see it that way. more . .

Jeremy Eichler mentions Emmanuel Music in his 2013 list of classical music picks. more . .

Good Times, Bum Times: Last Year in Boston
Lloyd Schwartz| New York Arts | December 28, 2013

At last, the first Boston performance of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby (a Met 1999 commission), in a superb concert version produced by Emmanuel Music and led by Emmanuel’s director Ryan Turner (and repeated at Tanglewood) more . .

The Sunday afternoon late-Beethoven piano recital at Emmanuel Church for Emmanuel Music featured Sergey Schepkin playing the last Bagatelles and opus 110 and Katherine Chi the Diabelli Variations. More to ponder. Bagatelles are akin to 'trick pieces', artistic director Ryan Turner informed us in brief remarks beforehand. more . .

Emmanuel Music presented the first concert of the fourth and final season of its Beethoven Chamber Series at Emmanuel Church on Sunday afternoon. Among the top tier of composers, it feels like Bach and Mozart receive more than their fair share of dedicated concerts and festivals while all-Beethoven programs [piano sonatas and the Ninth Symphony notwithstanding] might be slightly less common. But Emmanuel is proving that a well-planned and well-played Beethoven program doesn’t have to be overpowering, and in fact a full helping of Beethoven can affect perceptions of the works themselves and be very rewarding. more . .

On Saturday night at Emmanuel Church, the work was the anchor and highpoint of a program designed to spotlight what Emmanuel artistic director Ryan Turner referred to as Beethoven’s hidden gems. For the occasion, Emmanuel recruited pianist Robert Levin and tapped two string players from its own orchestra — violinist Heather Braun and cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer. more . .

Saturday night Emmanuel Music gathered under the baton of Ryan Turner with Beethoven to open its 2013-14 season. The Egmont Overture gave way to a selection of less frequently heard arias; the Triple Concerto, featuring BMInt’s Robert Levin, rounded out the polished program. more . .

On Saturday night at Emmanuel Church, the work was the anchor and highpoint of a program designed to spotlight what Emmanuel artistic director Ryan Turner referred to as Beethoven’s hidden gems. For the occasion, Emmanuel recruited pianist Robert Levin and tapped two string players from its own orchestra — violinist Heather Braun and cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer. more . .

2012-2013 Season

My colleagues, Lloyd Schwartz and Larry Wallach, have already written extensively about Emmanuel Music’s performance of John Harbison’s third opera, The Great Gatsby, both at Jordan Hall and at Tanglewood. I won’t attempt a full review, but I would like to share a few thoughts about the opera and the performance, both of which I heartily admired. more . .

[Revised] Arts Fuse Critic Roberta Silman has just added her review of the Tanglewood premiere of John Harbison’s opera version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. Read her reaction and others and join the conversation. Opinions about the new movie version welcome as well. more . .

The Great Gatsby John Harbison’s Opera performed at Tanglewood Dave Read, The Berkshires | July 11, 2013

The concert performance in Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood of The Great Gatsby, by the orchestra and chorus of Emmanuel Music, was so enjoyable that we’re tempted to propose a corollary to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage, There are no second acts in American lives, to wit, American novels can get third lives. more . .

How does one take on the daunting task of making an opera out of "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald's iconic novel about the Roaring '20s? In John Harbison's case, very carefully, working incrementally and with the ability to sustain the germ of an idea over a long timespan, in this case almost 30 years, expanding from an initial orchestral piece (which became the opera's overture), to a full-scale opera mounted by the Metropolitan Opera, with subsequent configurations and polishings. more . .

One thing that can be said for John Harbison, the composer of an operatic version of "The Great Gatsby" that was revived in concert at Tanglewood on Thursday, is that he was well ahead of the current "Gatsby" craze. more . .

One thing that can be said for John Harbison, the composer of an operatic version of "The Great Gatsby" that was revived in concert at Tanglewood on Thursday, is that he was well ahead of the current "Gatsby" craze. more . .

"The Great Gatsby," Sung Beneath the Stars
Robert Burke Warren, Rural Intelligence | July 5, 2013

When The Great Gatsby hit bookstores in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s peers loved it, but critical response was mixed; it sold poorly, and the definitive Jazz Age novel faded into obscurity for two decades, rising again only after WW II. Sadly, Fitzgerald, who passed away in 1940, did not live to see this turnaround, confirming, prematurely, the writer’s own line that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Composer John Harbison, by contrast, gets to enjoy the second act of his operatic interpretation of The Great Gatsby, presented in a concert version by Emmanuel Music on Thursday, July 11, at 7:30 p.m. at Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall. more . .

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has presented John Harbison with the Mark M. Horblit “Merit Award” for distinguished composition by an American composer. The award was created in 1947 by the late Boston attorney Mark M. Horblit to, in his own words, “foster and promote the writing of symphonic compositions by composers resident in the United States…in recognition of meritorious work in that field.” more . .

Fresh off the Boston premiere of John Harbison’s opera "The Great Gatsby," Emmanuel Music has some quite different music theater in store for its 2013-14 season: Stephen Sondheim’s "A Little Night Music," which Emmanuel will bring to the Boston Conservatory Theater on Jan. 18. more . .

Judicial Review #11:
"The Great Gatsby" — A Great Opera? The Arts Fuse | May 20, 2013

John Harbison’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was an opera a long time in the works: 14 years elapsed between Remembering Gatsby, a 1985 foxtrot for orchestra (which Harbison’s program note explains was adapted from an "abandoned" operatic setting) and the Metropolitan Opera premiere of The Great Gatsby in December 1999. more . .

John Harbison's The Great Gatsby in Boston
Lloyd Schwartz, New York Arts | May 17, 2013

"So we beat on, boats against the currents, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Nick Carraway’s concluding insight in The Great Gatsby is one of the great closing sentences in literature, and one of the great images of our human helplessness to escape the past. It’s also the line that ends John Harbison’s Gatsby opera, which—13 years after its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera—just had its first complete Boston performance, in a concert version produced by Emmanuel Music . . . more

A New Take on Dramatic Adaptation:
The Great Gatsby Opera
Jessica Monk, The Literary Traveler | May 17, 2013

Gone are the days when literature fans were ranting traditionalists, decrying other media besides quill and parchment. These days we’re as much dependent on the screen to feed our reading habits as anyone else. So how do we feel about an adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby, that makes the transition backward – to an older medium, from the page to the live action world of the stage? more ...

Talk about fortuitous timing. When Emmanuel Music set the date for its concert performance of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby, it had no idea that a movie blockbuster based on the same novel was premiering the same weekend. Infected by the enormous publicity the Baz Luhrmann movie received, it seemed that everyone in town was buzzing about Jay Gatsby and his gin-fueled parties. more ...

The theater world has an established tradition of developing new pieces over time through workshops and out-of-town tryouts, but the opera world has maintained, in certain quarters, a high-stakes tradition of what the composer John Harbison has called "the cold-bath opening night." Harbison’s vastly scaled third opera, The Great Gatsby, received one such cold bath in December of 1999, when it premiered on the not-so-out-of-town stage of the Metropolitan Opera. more ...

The Great Gatsby is the great elusive target of American literary adaptation, constantly pursued but never caught. Iconic and beloved, with a cool shell of distance wrapping a gooey center of pure romantic idolatry, it is so tempting, but I’m in the camp that believes any attempt to turn the novel into performing art is doomed from the start. This weekend has not disabused me of that opinion. However, both Baz Luhrmann’s art-direction orgasm of a film and John Harbison’s rather more sophisticated opera succeed in producing something of value as a result of their pursuits, even if what they created is not quite a complete success. more ...

Even while demonstrating yet again how stoutly F. Scott Fitzgerald’s delicate novel The Great Gatsby resists adaptation into other media, Emmanuel Music under Ryan Turner and 12 vocal soloists made spectacular sounds Sunday afternoon with a vibrant performance of John Harbison’s opera version of the story. Like the dance band in Fitzgerald’s description, the ensemble that stuffed the stage of New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall was “no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums.” And much else besides. more ...

A truly great Gatsby: John Harbison's opera gets a thrilling performance in BostonRoger Mortimer-Smith, bachtrack | May 15, 2013

Between Baz Luhrmann’s recent film The Great Gatsby, Northern Ballet’s The Great Gatsby currently at Sadler’s Wells, and Elevator Repair Service’s circulation-testing, eight-hour Gatz at the Noël Coward Theatre last year, Londoners such as myself could be forgiven for feeling all Gatsbied out (in truth, Gatz could probably have achieved that by itself). This perfect storm of Gatsbys seems to be pure coincidence – neither 2012 nor 2013 is a significant anniversary, either for the novel or Fitzgerald himself – so anyone asking why no major opera houses joined the party by staging John Harbison’s operatic treatment of the story could be answered that there was no reason for there to be a party in the first place. more ...

Gatsby is back! F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel continues to haunt us with its portrait of glitter, frivolity and bad behavior. There have been TV, radio, theatrical, literary, even computer-game adaptations. The fifth major Gatsby movie is playing in theaters; and on May 12th at Jordan Hall, Emmanuel Music will present in concert form, the New England premiere of John Harbison’s brilliant Grand Opera The Great Gatsby. more ...

Ryan Turner, artistic director of Emmanuel Music, described the programmatic glue of Sunday’s post-blizzard program as "theme and variations." The fine group of four Beethoven lieder he chose reflected this conception: their texts were all variations on the idea of the variegated nature—bliss and suffering, hope and ecstasy—of love, as in most lyric German poetry of that period: Liebe, Sehnsucht, Blume, and Grab are the watchwords. more ...

In a string quartet, the viola and the second violin are commonly referred to as the inner voices, less frequently in the spotlight, yet essential to the core of any ensemble’s sound. Mary Ruth Ray, as the founding violist of the Lydian String Quartet and as a key member of the ensemble at ­Emmanuel Music, was one of Boston’s most dependable ­inner voices. more ...

The music of J.S. Bach is an enduring feature of Emmanuel Music. This is most evident at Sunday services, where a Bach cantata is performed nearly every weekend at Emmanuel Church, but one senses that the composer is somehow present there at all times. And for the third consecutive year, the ensemble is guiding a small group of students through an intensive study of Bach’s music. more ...

Last night Emmanuel Music presented J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248, to a crowded nave in Emmanuel Church. This was a marathon concert with many highlights. Bach composed this work for Advent season in 1734–35. The whole is divided into six parts, each a cantata in its own right, and originally designed to be performed on different days during liturgical services from Christmas through Epiphany. more ...

Unlike Handel’s "Messiah", Bach’s "Christmas Oratorio" has never been a Boston holiday tradition. Of course, it didn’t start out as a single performance piece in its home town of Leipzig. Bach composed (or recomposed — a lot of recycling was involved) the oratorio in 1734, and the six cantatas that make it up were first presented individually in the churches of St. Thomas and St. Nicholas between Christmas Day and Epiphany of 1734-35. more ...

A capacity crowd filled the Parish Hall at Emmanuel Church in the Back Bay Sunday for the inaugural concert of the third season of Emmanuel Music’s traversal of the complete chamber music of Ludwig van Beethoven. The first two seasons focused mostly on early Beethoven; with this season Emmanuel makes the transition to the middle-period masterworks, adding modern counterpoints from John Harbison in each concert in the series. more ...

On this Sunday, Emmanuel Music begins its 42nd consecutive season of Bach Cantatas with full orchestra. The series is integral to religious services for most of the Sundays in the liturgical calendar. This has been an astonishing run, well exceeding Bach’s 27 years at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. The late Craig Smith presided over the first 37, and then John Harbison and others took over the roles of conductor and music director on interim bases until Ryan Turner was appointed two years ago. more ...

2011-2012 Season

While Mozart’s penultimate opera La Clemenza di Tito K. 621, (The Mercy of Titus) is often described in terms of its utilitarian genesis and dramatic shortcomings, on Saturday night Emmanuel Music simply, and powerfully, relied upon Mozart’s music. Their concert setting at Emmanuel Church sold a work that is often a tough sale for contemporary audiences more ...

La Clemenza di Tito is the least performed and most difficult to execute of Mozart’s mature operas. Not only does the score call for a castrato (taken by a mezzo-soprano or countertenor today) prima donna with both extraordinary fire and range, the serious work lacks Mozart’s usual light touch more ...

Recently uploaded, here's an hour-long interview of Peter Sellars with Simon Halsey (chief conductor of the Rundfunkchor Berlin) from April 2010 in the Berlin Philharmonie all about Bach's early music masterpiece, Matthäus-Passion more ...

The poet James Fenton has written about the purity and intensity of joy we experience as young children through activities as simple as dancing, jumping, and singing. There is a kind of mercy, he says, in what he calls the “primal erasure,’’ the forgetting of these moments, or else their loveliness might spoil us for life more ...

From Bach to Stravinsky at Emmanuel
Jeffrey Gantz, The Boston Globe | February 13, 2012

Just about any program of classical music written after his death, in 1750, could be called “Connected by Bach,’’ so pervasive is the master’s influence. But the quartet of pieces that Emmanuel Music assembled for its concert Saturday night at Emmanuel Church would have been welcome under any rubric: Bach’s own Orchestral Suite No. 4, John Corigliano’s “Fancy on a Bach Air,’’ Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks’’ Concerto, and then, for the second half of the evening, Stravinsky’s complete “Pulcinella’’ ballet. more ...

Stravinsky, Corigliano are colorfully connected with Bach by Emmanuel Music
David Wright, The Boston Classical Review | February 12, 2012

Emmanuel Music, founded to perform the cantatas of J.S. Bach, turned a refracting telescope on the master Saturday night at Emmanuel Church with a program of his orchestral music coupled with 20th-century works by Stravinsky and Corigliano. more ...

While much of Boston was setting out the hors d’oeuvres for Super Bowl parties, a crowd packed into the parish hall at Emmanuel Church late Sunday afternoon to witness a more intimate kind of matchup. This one also lasted for about 60 minutes, but without any timeouts or halftime. It did not require protective clothing, but demanded no less stamina, conditioning, or psychological preparation. There were only two participants: tenor Frank Kelley and pianist Russell Sherman more ...

Emmanuel Music continues to offer programs of unique interest to the Boston concert-going public. Franz Schubert’s first song cycle, DieschöneMüllerin, was given a thorough and heartfelt reading in Emmanuel Church on February 5 for an adoring crowd of some 300 listeners. Schubert made a major contribution to the Romantic legacy, and certainly established a song repertoire, not since surpassed, with some 600 solo works in his short life of 31 years more ...

For the fourth and last of this year’s concerts dedicated to Beethoven’s chamber music, Emmanuel Music presented some quite rarely heard works, all of which deserved a hearing. Four string players, two horn players, a baritone and a pianist took turns entertaining the full hall, and brought this series to an unusually delightful end more ...

Emmanuel Music continued the second year of their Beethoven chamber series at Emmanuel Church on Sunday, January 8 with another program exploring Beethoven’s creative output in his earliest years. For quite a few years, Emmanuel Music has explored the chamber music of several composers in comprehensive fashion, playing little-known and under-appreciated works alongside art songs and more popular warhorses more ...

Johann Sebastian Bach wasn't the first composer to recycle previous material, but he might have been the first to put together his own greatest-hits album. Conceived in 1733, as an offering to the new Elector of Saxony, Bach's Mass in B minor wasn't completed till 1749, the year before his death, and he borrowed liberally from his cantatas and oratorios to create this affirmation of personal belief, a massive work spanning close to two hours (or more, if you're Otto Klemperer) more ...

Believe it or not, there are places in the world where performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s B minor Mass are fairly rare. In Boston, however, rare is the season that passes without at least one opportunity to hear that monument. On Saturday, it was Emmanuel Music offering the Mass as its concert season opener, led by its director, Ryan Turner. And the performance demonstrated both the advantages of such familiarity and, perhaps, the dangers. more ...

The nave of Emmanuel Church in Boston was filled on Saturday evening, September 24, for Emmanuel Music’s presentation of Bach’s B-minor Mass, BWV 23. TheMass is both a curiosity and a summation: the curiosity comes from a devout Lutheran writing a (not-quite Roman Catholic) Mass complete with Nicene Creed, a work the composer never heard performed; and a summation of the composer’s career, encompassing self-citation, range of compositional and contrapuntal technique, as well as a devoted setting of the text of the mass which must clearly owe something to the composer’s own religious feeling. more ...

2010-2011 Season

Emmanuel Music ventured a bit off their “beaten path” on Saturday, April 16, presenting Igor Stravinsky’s famed opera, The Rake’s Progress, inspired by a series of paintings and engravings of that name by eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth. Ryan Turner expertly led a fine cast, orchestra, and chorus, and the performance was a virtually unqualified success. more ...

Honoring a lyrical lament of love lost
Matthew Guerrieri, The Boston Globe | April 18, 2011

In the first act of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,’’ Tom Rakewell, a fledgling libertine, grieves for lost love. “How sad a song,’’ a chorus of prostitutes replies, “but sadness charms.’’ It took a little while, but Emmanuel Music’s concert performance of the opera on Saturday night eventually achieved that balance of charismatic, exuberant woe. more ...

The final Beethoven concert of the Emmanuel Music season took place in the Parish Hall of Emmanuel Church on the afternoon of Feb. 27. Unlike the others in this chamber music series, this one was all instrumental, taken from the composer’s early years. In his introductory remarks, Emmanuel Music Director Ryan Turner explained that these pieces reflected different aspects of Beethoven’s character: the street smart, the Mozartean, and the most popular piece in the composer’s lifetime (even though he disparaged it.) more ...

The first of two concerts in Emmanuel Music’s Sunday afternoon Winter Beethoven Chamber series, on February 13 in the Parish Hall at Emmanuel Church, was devoted to songs and chamber works from Beethoven’s first years in Vienna. Having arrived there at the end of 1792, Beethoven set himself the task of mastering all the then-current musical genres. more ...

Boston’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church on Newbury Street became famous among music lovers during the 1970s for the performances of Bach cantatas led by the late Craig Smith during its Sunday services. The tradition continues under Ryan Turner, Smith’s successor as church Music Director and Artistic Director of Emmanuel Music, the church’s resident ensemble. more ...

Harbison has faith in Bach translation
David Weininger, The Boston Globe | January 14, 2011

John Harbison’s first experience of singing Bach cantatas came in the early 1960s, when he was a student in Berlin. There he sang with a church school choir called the Spandauer Kantorei and was an assistant to its director, Hanns-Martin Schneidt. Harbison remembers Schneidt’s insistent focus on the cantatas’ words, and the impression those words made on his fellow singers, all of whom spoke German as a native tongue. more ...

Emmanuel Music presented their second Beethoven chamber series at Emmanuel Church on Sunday afternoon, November 14. In the words of Artistic Director Ryan Turner, this series is “somewhat chronological” and ended with the “recreational” Beethoven, selections from the Scottish songs, op. 108. more ...

Emmanuel Music, under new artistic director Ryan Turner, began its chamber music series on Sunday afternoon, October 31, at Emmanuel Church. In a nod to the late Craig Smith, founder of Emmanuel Music, the concert featured early works by Beethoven surrounding the somber Gellert songs, when the composer was experiencing deafness. more ...

After the shock of losing visionary founder Craig Smith in 2007, Emmanuel Music eyed its future with commendable restraint and, after a good think, placed the shaping of its course in the hands of another thinking man’s choral conductor, Ryan Turner. more ...

2009-2010 Season

From its creation in 1970, Emmanuel Music has been associated inextricably with the artistic spirit of its founder, Craig Smith. Even after Smith's death, in 2007, his influence has lingered. The organization's last two seasons had been planned by Smith prior to his passing. more…

2008-2009 Season

Since Craig Smith's death in 2007, composer John Harbison has been in a caretaker role at Emmanuel Music, serving as acting artistic director. This season, Emmanuel has been honoring Smith's legacy with a series of Bach concerts culminating this weekend with two performances of the composer's mighty "St. Matthew Passion." more…

Emmanuel Music gave the Boston musical community a splendid present by presenting all six Bach cello suites by different cellists in free midday concerts on successive Thursdays in Back Bay’s intimate Leslie Lindsey Chapel. Performing between February 26 and April 2 were Rhonda Rider, Shannon Snapp, Joshua Gordon, Michael Curry, Beth Pearson, and Rafael Popper-Keizer. more…

A gold mine of six cello suites
David Weininger, Boston Globe |
February 21, 2009 more...

This week’s Schumann offering from Emmanuel Music, now in its fifth year of presenting all of Robert Schumann’s compositions, featured two guest artists, Ya-Fei Chuang and Robert Levin, with Emmanue Music regulars. The program consisted of Wilhelm Meister Lieder, Op 98a, with Kendra Colton, soprano, Mark McSweeney, bass, and Ya-Fei Chuang, piano. It was followed by the composer’s Toccata in C Major, Op. 7, Ya-Fei Chuang at the piano. The final piece was the Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 63, with Rose Mary Harbison, violin, Rhonda Rider, cello, and Robert Levin, piano. more...

Emmanuel Music's 2008-09 season is the last to have been planned by its late founder, Craig Smith, and is dedicated to his memory. Smith was not a man to do things halfway; comprehensiveness was his mantra. So it comes as little surprise that he would have programmed all six of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos for Thursday's opening-night concert. more...

2007-2008 Season

Collaboration with Mark Morris Dance Group: Dido and Aenas

Morris’s next step is with a baton
David Weininger, Boston Globe | May 23, 2008 more...